


it's all one supposes

by recoveringrabbit



Series: all great words [4]
Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: F/M, Future Fic, Perthshire Cottage, did you know that's a suggested tag on Ao3, hashtag blessed, spring feels
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-17
Updated: 2017-04-17
Packaged: 2018-10-20 07:40:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,923
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10657977
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/recoveringrabbit/pseuds/recoveringrabbit
Summary: In which Fitz-Simmons take advantage of a sunny day, and Jemma muses on how things grow.





	it's all one supposes

While giving Archie his bath in their kitchen sink, Jemma looks out the window over the garden and decides that today will be the day the strawberry plants go in.

“We already planted raspberries,” Fitz murmurs sleepily, curling his arm around their wet and squirmy son so he doesn’t roll off the edge of their bed, “do we really need strawberries too?”

She rolls her eyes as she pulls a worn cable-knit jumper over her head. “Do you like jam?”

“We’re making our own jam now?” He folds his other arm beneath his head, blinking less deliberately as he comes into himself. His eyes are already affectionate, even half-asleep—though they always are, these days. “I must say, Simmons, I never imagined you would be such a housewife.”

“That’s a bit bold coming from the man who created a Pintrest account for nursery inspiration.”

He makes a bit of a face, turning his head to stage-whisper at Archie. “She’ll never let me live that down, but she cried when she saw it. Don’t let her convince you it was hormones.”

“Anyway, I already bought the plants,” she says over her shoulder on the way to the ensuite. “And we’ll have fresh strawberries whenever we like, all summer long, and when your mother comes we can have strawberry tarts from our own garden.”

She knows his grumbling is only out of habit, and sure enough by the time she has sorted Archie and all his paraphernalia Fitz has already begun hauling the flats of plants out of the shed despite Mops' enthusiastic attempts to trip him up. Seeing her, he dramatically straightens and places his hands at the small of his back. “There must be a hundred plants here, Jemma.”

“Possibly,” she admits.

His eyebrows draw together, slightly pained. “Do you know that a single strawberry plant can produce seven hundred grams of strawberries? We’re going to be swimming in them.”

“We have the space in the bed,” she says unconcernedly, kneeling to tuck Archie into his bouncy seat. “And won’t it be nice to enjoy so much fruit from our labour?”

Fitz has always been the funny one between the two of them, but since they stepped back from SHIELD she’s found that gentle jokes spill out of her, like all they needed was a little bit of peace to grow. Archie tends to get more laughter than she does—neither she nor Fitz can help their delight in him escaping aloud—but she treasures even Fitz’s slightly amused smirk, grateful for every chance she gets to see him happy. This time, he gives her a groan of mock-disgust and shakes his head. “Just tell me we don’t have to use manure.”

“It’s really better for them, but just for you, we’ll let them grow without help. We may not win any prizes, but—”

“What,” he says, “your domestic goals don’t include fruit and veg shows?”

“This year, at least.”

“God help us,” he mutters, but he comes over to kiss the top of her head. “Did you put on sun cream?”

“On Archie? Yes. Though it’s difficult to imagine much sun getting to him.” She holds his tiny socked foot, casting a thoughtful eye over the trousers, jumper, broad-brimmed hat with a monkey’s face printed on, and the sunshade Fitz has rigged to adjust as the sun moves.

“On you, you pasty English rose. You just said last week you had more freckles than skin.”

What she remembers about that conversation is him answering “I love every single one” and then proving it, so perhaps it’s natural that she isn’t too bothered about preventing more. Her silence provides the answer he’s looking for. Tsking at her, he pulls a small tube from his front pocket and squirts some into one palm, extending the other to pull her to her feet. “C’mere. Let’s not end the day with either of us resemblin’ a strawberry.”

He dots her nose and cheeks; she makes sure to cover the back of his neck and tips of his ears, sliding her hands around to pull his mouth to hers. He smells like soil and summer, and no matter how often she kisses him she’ll never be tired of the way it makes the sun appear from behind the clouds. He smiles when they break apart, tucking a strand of hair that’s fallen from her plait back into place. “Ah, I see you’ve read my mind. Kissing, not planting.”

“Or both,” she says with a last playful peck at his jaw. “It’s the spring, after all.”

It’s been spring for weeks, technically, but this is the first day that she feels it: the temperature hovers at a balmy sixteen degrees; a gentle breeze blowing the wispy clouds quickly past; the scent of bluebells drifts over the garden’s stone wall. Fitz works diligently, measuring out the proper distance between plants and trowelling out the holes for her to fill as he listens intently to her explanation of her current SHIELD project. In his bouncy chair, Archie takes advantage of his new ability to differentiate colors by watching a pinwheel spin lazily around, and Mops stands guard at his side when she's not distracted by anything else. As Jemma carefully pats down the roots and covers them with dirt, she could hum as contentedly as a bumblebee.

By noon, they have planted a little more than half the strawberries and it’s time to eat, since the only true difference between her husband and her son is that Fitz does a fairly decent job of not crying when he’s hungry. He makes the sandwiches while she feeds Archie, then she eats while he takes over the potentially hazardous task of burping the baby. It never ceases to amuse and astonish her how tasks that would have made Fitz cringe when she first knew him have become rote. As he rubs and pats rhythmically, his eyes stare out unseeingly over their work.

“What are you thinking?” she asks, because despite everyone’s assumption that they can read each other’s minds, one of the things she has always loved most about Fitz is the way he surprises her.

“About the lab,” he says, indicating the old stone stables with his chin. “It’s missing something.”

“A vacuum chamber?”

“No.” He cants his head thoughtfully. “Colour. I think we should plant some flame flowers along this side. They’ll grow up without growing on the wall and compromising the integrity of the stone. And there’s red flowers in the summer and berries in the autumn, so that’ll look nice.”

She means to respond but just then Fitz’s efforts result in a soft noise and a great deal of white spit-up that he only barely manages to catch in the flannel. Shaking his head ruefully, he lifts Archie up to eye level. “Too right, my man. I really shouldn’t give mummy a hard time, since apparently I’ve turned into Alan Titchmarsh when we weren’t paying attention.”

“No one would ever mistake you for a Yorkshire lad, even being married to me.”

“If someone asked me about my future ten years ago,” he tells their son, “I never would have told them ‘I will spend my days off planting acres of strawberries and offering opinions on Scottish flame flowers.’ I almost don’t recognise myself.”

Anyone less like the cocky, irritable, fiendishly clever Fitz of a decade ago would be difficult to imagine, she admits. Neither does she much resemble the naïve, uptight girl she had been. They’ve both toughened and softened, learned to bear weight and to let it go, lost everything but their love for and commitment to each other. But as she takes him in—his ancient converse and the Ravenclaw jumper she gave him for his nineteenth birthday, the glints of gold in his beard that have all but disappeared from his hair, the uncharacteristic dirt under his fingernails and rimming his wedding ring from their work—he doesn’t seem so different, after all. He tucks their son’s head into what has always been her spot on his shoulder with a sure and careful hold and she sees, all at once, how the Fitz she met at sixteen bloomed into this astounding, magnificent man. “I would,” she says firmly, planting her hand on his kneecap.

“Would recognise me? I hope so.”

“No.” She reaches for the right words and finds them hanging in the air, ripe for the picking. “Would have told them this was our future. I used to—I dreamt about this.”

“Dreamt—” Understanding lights his eyes. “You mean when you were...when we were apart.”

“No,” she says, shaking her head, and then, “well, yes. Of course then.” They had been the cruelest dreams of all to wake from, leaving a world of fresh food and sun and Fitz to return to a dark, barren hell, but she had relished every one all the same. “But not only then,” she persists. “Before that. Ages. I think I’ve been dreaming about this since SciOps.”

“This?” He catches her eye around Archie’s head, incredulous. “Jemma, I know you said—”

“Not all, perhaps. Archie wasn’t always there.” She drifts a hand over their son’s downy head, overwhelmingly grateful that he is now. “But you and me in our garden? I can’t even remember the first time I had that dream. It was my favorite.”

His smile has been growing as she speaks, and now it shoots upwards at one corner into the soft, crooked grin he saves just for her. “Grubby hands and knees with me beats out a Nobel Prize?”

She doesn’t even pretend to consider it before she swoops in to kiss him, placing one hand over his on Archie’s back and moving the other to its rightful place on his face. His smile persists under her thumb, the cheeky monkey, but she doesn’t mind too much since she is smiling too. For so long she was content with pots of basil and vases of carnations, and now she has bluebells and heather and irises and tea roses and carrots and _acres_ of strawberries, the hard-won fruit of all their labour. And it feels like spring and summer and harvest all at once.

They break the kiss when Archie protests, wailing a little to remind his parents that he doesn’t like being left out of things. Laughing, Fitz uses his forehead to draw her eyes to his. “So, that’s a no on the Nobel Prize, then?”

“I’m not ruling it out,” she says, stroking through his whiskers. “There’s still time. But first—”

“Yeah?” he asks, eyes bright.

“I think a Best in Show ribbon from the local fruit and veg show might suffice.”

He rolls his eyes to the heavens, but brushes a kiss across her mouth before carefully getting to his knees to return Archie to the bouncy seat. “I knew it. You probably have sacks of manure hiding somewhere, don’t you. Well, I’m not digging up what we’ve already planted. All that trauma isn’t good for them.”

“Thank you, Alan Titchmarsh.”

“Let’s not make that a thing,” he pleads, already reaching into his pocket after the sun cream. “I didn’t mean it.”

She only grins mischievously as she clambers to her feet, snagging the cream and applying it liberally to the bridge of his nose. “Let’s see how the garden does first, hmm? If it’s appropriate, after all...”

She has no doubts how their garden will turn out, though. Once the petals are unfurled, all that’s left is fragrant, golden new life.

 

**Author's Note:**

> This isn't very long, but somehow has a lot of notes to give:
> 
> I am not a gardener, but I have done a great deal of research on strawberries in the last few days, so please don't tell me I've totally mucked it up. They are hardy plants and I think will grow even in Scotland.
> 
> Also Scottish flame flowers are gorgeous and you ought to look them up.
> 
> Alan Titchmarsh is apparently the most famous British gardening personality according to several reputable sites—though I now live in England, we don't talk about gardeners that much, astonishingly.
> 
> Allow me a brief moment of self-advertisement to say that you can read about the night Jemma has her first garden dream in my story Night In, which is one of my personal favourites of my own work. 
> 
> Anyone care to guess the title's origin? Hint: it has to do with Spring.
> 
> Notices over.


End file.
